Many litecoin investors followed the wrong herd last December when its founder Charlie Lee sold all of his shares in the company to avoid a conflict of interest. This should have indicated to investors that the price would not hold and would decline, Spatafora says. Instead of selling, many crypto investors bought more litecoin "like idiots when it was not sustainable," he says.

Be more cautious about investing your 401k into Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin Investment Trust $GBTC. The (European) XBT Provider ETN is an open-ended fund which means it maintains a premium to the NAV close to 0% at all times. The Bitcoin Investment Trust is an inferior investment vehicle because it is a closed-end fund (it does not increase its holdings of the underlying asset when demand for the product increases) which means it is subject to wild swings in its premium, which has been as high as 150%. So you could make the mistake of buying when the premium is high and suffer swingeing losses even when the Bitcoin price is stable.

Figure out if you want to go long or short. Are you going short with every penny you have to invest, or are you going to go long with some and short with some? Long-term investors will pay a lower tax rate if they can hold for over 12 months, but as a trade-off, they WILL have to sit through corrections (likely seeing their balance go down 50% plus on paper as often as they see it go up). Short-term investors can avoid corrections if they are nimble, but they’ll owe taxes on the profits from each trade they do along the way (see: how taxes work with cryptocurrency to understand how the long term and short term capital gains tax work with cryptocurrency).
We will describe these cryptocurrency trading strategies for you here, and the first ones we’ll review are the technical strategies. With technical trading, you have two basic strategies to use for the trading of cryptocurrency. You’re either going to trade with the trend/momentum of the current market, or you’ll be trading for mean reversion. Mean reversion is when you think the spring has been pulled too tight, and your waiting for that spring to snap back to an equilibrium point.
Limits orders allow us to place an order at a specific price. We can specify the amount of coin that we want to buy or sell, at the price that we want this to happen at. You may have noticed that the order book is always full of sell orders that are a little higher than the current price and buy orders that are a little lower. The advantage with limit orders is that we can do do the same with our orders. The disadvantage is that our transaction likely will not be filled immediately and will count on the market price to make its way towards us.
Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, wrote a pamphlet in 1719, “The Anatomy of Exchange Alley or, a system of stock jobbing. Proving that scandalous trade, as it is now carry'd on, to be knavish in its private practice, and treason in its publick.” Does the sentiment sound familiar? I have republished some books from the turn of the 19th century with a preface saying basically, “Do you notice the stock market is basically unchanged even after more than a 100 years of historical turmoil?” The scams and attitudes of the market and its participants are still so recognizable after over 100 years you are left to wonder if the billions spent on compliance on the worlds bourses are not a complete waste of money.
Cheap fees and fast exchanges. For each trade, the exchange platform you’re using will take a small percentage as commission for the service it’s providing. This is inevitable. Where cryptocurrency trades differ from their fiat currency equivalent is in the size of this fee. Because the fees for transferring cryptocurrencies (typically via wallet payments) are cheaper than credit card and bank transfer fees, cryptocurrency-trading fees are cheaper than forex-trading fees.
Cryptocurrency. Lack of regulation is its biggest appeal. However, that may change, given a recent call for regulating this segment. Though it is a big hit with investors, especially because of the record run of Bitcoin, the most popular of all the digital currencies, there have been skeptics crying foul over the legitimacy of this investment class.
There is also an Ethereum-based ETF pending regulatory review, and many such products are likely to follow. For now, there are just a few options available. For example, ticker symbol GBTC is one such security listed on the US-based OTC Markets Exchange, and is available at major online brokerages such as Fidelity, providing stock market investors a way to gain exposure to Bitcoin without buying the underlying or using a derivative.

Learn to value coins in BTC. Ether aside, Bitcoin is the current primary currency of the crypto economy (i.e., its what you have to use to buy most altcoins). Those new to crypto tend to value things in dollars. Meanwhile, even seasoned cash traders value coins in dollars. However, enough crypto traders will value coins in BTC for it to matter. If you aren’t aware of the BTC charts, you won’t be able to properly understand the trends everyone else is analyzing and reacting to. You don’t have to make getting more BTC your goal, but you must have the BTC prices of altcoins on your radar. There are times when all coins move up, but altcoins steadily lose value against Bitcoin. Those who know will be the first to dump altcoins for Bitcoin; this will set off a vicious cycle that can result in the stagnation of altcoin prices.

This is one of the most important cryptocurrency tips. By looking at the number of wallets vs the number of active wallets and the current trading volume, you can attempt to give a specific currency a current value. You can then make informed decisions based on today’s market price. The more accurate your predictions, the greater your chances for profit.

Don’t invest blindy. There are people in this world who would sell a blind person a pair of glasses if they could make money. Those same people play in the cryptocurrency markets and use every opportunity to exploit less-informed investors. They’ll tell you what to buy or claim certain coins will moon, just to increase the prices so they can exit. Due to the highly speculative nature of the cryptocurrency markets today, a good investor will always do his or her own research in order to take full responsibility for the potential investment outcome. Information coming from even the best investor is, at best, great information, but never a promise, so you can still get burned.